Common advice for developers who want to share their skills online is to start a blog. Still, when sites like Stack Overflow have a dramatic decrease in the number of questions, and considering the rise of chatbots that make it increasingly easy to get answers to specific questions, the fact is that starting a coding blog in 2025 could be a Road to nowhere.
What do I know about coding blogs? Well, at one point, my personal blog was getting 75,000 unique visitors per month, and having seen this number dramatically decrease, rather than feeling terrified about the future impact of AI. I’m looking at other Alternatives open to developers like you to continue to share their knowledge and wisdom, just in a completely new way.
Speed and Context in Problem Solving:
Last time you were faced with a tricky coding problem you couldn’t overcome on your own, what resource did you reach out to first?
For me, these days, my default choice is ChatGPT, which is really helpful because it takes into account the context of your specific problem and fairly often gives you decent ideas to solve it. For many developers now, only when their AI fails them do they resort to what used to be the king of answers: Google.
In a way, I love it. Because when I started blogging in 2019, I was writing technical articles, and I was surprised how Google picked up certain keywords that people were obviously searching for. Once I saw that, I realized that pumping out dozens of Articles was a decent way to get more traffic from Google.
And while seeing the visitor account go up feels good, if you put yourself in the shoes of someone searching on Google, normally, when you’ve got a problem to solve, you want to find the answer as quickly as possible. That means if you have a coding blog, people come and go very quickly, often never returning.
Actually, that desire to get the answer as quickly as possible is why AI technology, in 90% of cases, is infinitely more helpful than searching Google and reading through yet another coding block.
The Obsolescence of Rewriting Documentation:
You might be thinking: Well chat ChatGPT doesn’t know everything.
Have you ever read through a documentation site and, however hard you try to understand the concepts, it just doesn’t sink in? You can think of documentation for development Frameworks and tools as the source of Truth for how they work.
The problem is, developers who write that documentation don’t always explain it in a way that helps you understand effectively. About 50% of the content I wrote on my blog was a reinterpretation of official documentation. Well, back in 2019, that information might have been valuable. Today, it’s no match for AI, which is trained on precisely these documentation sites.
The Fantastic thing is, for users of those AI tools, you can ask very specific questions and get precise answers, rather than sifting through documentation yourself or looking for a blog post that explains it in a way that makes sense to you. In the future, those kinds of blog posts will go away because AI will be able to interpret data from any website and explain it to you in simple terms.
AI’s Future in Interpreting and Explaining Data:
But remember, I said 50% of my blog posts were like that, and what about the other 50% which is basically documenting combining Technologies in unique ways that aren’t explained in the official documentation, that could be running your favorite CI tool in AWS, or figuring out how to get your favorite build tool to deploy to your cloud provider of choice.
The Limited Value of Documenting Unique Tech Combinations:
There are an almost infinite number of combinations of Technologies. Writing a blog post about something that worked for you can be valuable to someone else who wants to follow the same path.
But eventually, your carefully crafted blog post is going to end up as training data for an AI. So you might find that the audience for that post isn’t what you hoped for.
What was the last piece of content created by a human that you consumed online that really got you excited for development? If you’re anything like me, it wasn’t a really technical blog post; it was more likely a story that another developer shared that you could relate to and maybe even inspired you to take action towards that goal you’ve been putting off.
The Missing Ingredient:
Well, based on what I’ve said, if you don’t think starting a blog is the right approach for you, there’s an alternative option.
Because if you think about content created by AI, it’s missing one key ingredient that maybe it will never be capable of achieving: that’s relatability.
Because it’s a machine, not a flesh-and-blood software developer like you and me (assuming you’re not an AI reading this). That’s why I believe anyone who wants to share their development skills online should try to avoid competing with AI on a technical level, but instead combine their expertise with their life experience, which only they have.
Taking this approach is actually more interesting than writing dry, boring technical how-to guides. However long you’ve been developing software, whether it’s one week or one decade, have you ever considered that you have valuable experience that others could learn from that you’re not even aware of?
Alternative to Blogging:
So, as an alternative to blogging, follow these three steps:
Brainstorm 10 to 20 problems you’ve overcome in your development work recently that others, a few steps behind you, might benefit from.
Step two is to add your human perspective that AI can’t compete with. One approach that’s working okay for me right now is to consider how you felt before you solved that problem, and how your life changed for the better afterwards.
By combining your unique experience with your technical knowledge, you give a compelling reason for somebody to consume your content, which they’re going to relate to a lot more than a soulless AI chatbot.
Social Media Over Dying Medium of Blogging:
Step three is the fun part, where you get to turn your content idea into reality. Since most developers’ attention right now seems to be more towards social media rather than Google, whatever social media platform you use could be a good place to start.
By lowering the bar and not aiming for Perfection, you can produce educational content that can also inspire. So by avoiding posting content through the what I believe to be dying medium of blogging, you can instead go to where the eyeballs are and have just as much success.
Conclusion:
Let me leave you with this thought: it’s a pretty exciting time to be a software developer. As AI tools become more and more prevalent, the challenge that I know you’re more than capable of rising to is to make the most of that new technology, carve a space for yourself in this constantly changing environment. See you in the next blog.
FAQs:
1. Why are coding blogs losing popularity today?
Because AI tools now give faster, more contextual answers than long blog posts.
2. Is rewriting documentation still useful in 2025?
Not really, since AI can interpret and explain official docs better than most blogs.
3. Can technical blogs about unique tech combinations still work?
They can, but their audience shrinks as that information becomes AI training data.
4. What type of content can developers create that AI cannot replace?
Personal stories and relatable experiences that only real developers can share.
5. What should developers focus on instead of blogging?
Sharing lessons, struggles, and wins on social platforms where the audience actually is.
6. How can developers stand out in an AI-dominated world?
By mixing technical knowledge with human authenticity that machines cannot replicate.